A Novel Proposal for All Optical Analog-to-Digital Converter Based on Photonic Crystal Structures

In this paper, we proposed a novel all optical analog-to-digital (ADC) converter based on photonic crystals. First of all, we designed a three port nonlinear demultiplexer, for producing discrete levels of input optical intensity. Then, an optical coder was used to generate a 2-bit standard binary code out of the discrete levels coming from the nonlinear demultiplexer. The final structure was realized by combining the nonlinear demultiplexer with the optical coder. The maximum sampling rate of the proposed structure obtained to be about 200 GS/s, and the total footprint is about 806 μm².